It is no secret that Naperville has become something of a foodie’s paradise, boasting everything from celebrity chef restaurants to high-end steakhouses to Korean, Filipino and French cuisines. But some local spots are not getting the attention they deserve, according to Naperville resident Juan D avid Campolargo. “In Naperville especially, you see so many restaurants that open and they just close so rapidly,” Campolargo said. A major part of the issue, he said, is visibility. Particularly online visibility and what Google does or does not show you in a search. “When discovery is dominated by algorithms that reward whoever already has momentum, it becomes much harder for new or independent places to survive long enough to ever be discovered at all, even by people who live a few blocks away,” he said. To remedy the issue, Campolargo created the Naperville Underrated Food Map, a data-driven approach to highlighting restaurants that may not always appear at the top of a Google search. “I just created this thing to hopefully help,” he said. “(The) real heroes are the restaurants and the people behind them. Keeping local places alive and making our town feel a little more connected is my humble goal.” While Campolargo himself does not work in the restaurant industry, he has previously been involved in various food-related projects. There’s no particular reason why the 23-year-old undertakes the projects other than curiosity and a strong drive for problem solving, he said. This screenshot shows the page a user can fill out when trying to find a new restaurant to check out via the online Naperville Underrated Food Map created by Naperville resident Juan David Campolargo. (Naperville Underrated Food Map) For example, when Campolargo was a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he created a bot account on X, formerly known as Twitter, with the handle @UIUCFreeFood, which would advertise opportunities for free food around the campus. The account is still active with more than 2,000 followers, although it previously ran into trouble with university administration over misleading posts and an instance of alleged theft, something on which Campolargo declined to comment. His most recent project with the Naperville Underrated Food Map, which can be found at www.juandavidcampolargo.com/projects/naperville-food-map, is a continuation of his problem-solving efforts. “When you type ‘Where to eat?’ on Google, how does Google show you what it shows you? It’s a bunch of factors, right?” Campolargo said. Those factors include how close a particular restaurant is to where a person is currently located, how many positive reviews a restaurant has received and whether that restaurant is part of a national chain. What Campolargo focused on for his food map was “prominence,” which refers to businesses that have received significant positive ratings, a high number of reviews or are a well-established brand more likely to be pushed out by the algorithm. “And then you have this reinforcing loop,” he said. “If you’re doing well and you’re popular, Google is great for you, but if you’re new or newer or independent, you don’t really have a chance to build prominence.” In the context of the map, underrated is defined as “better than you’d expect given how certain places usually perform online,” Campolargo said. For example, if you have 10 Thai restaurants in close proximity that all perform similarly and have a collective rating of 3.6, the average rating of those 10 restaurants together becomes the expectation. A restaurant that significantly exceeds that benchmark is considered underrated — not because it’s the best overall, but because it outperforms what diners might reasonably expect, Campolargo said. Using a machine learning model, the map also considers more than just restaurant ratings. It also considers cuisine, price levels, review volume, neighborhood grid, chain vs. independent, restaurant type and location-level attention patterns. Using all those factors, the model learns the typical patterns for restaurants in the area, provides an expected rating for each place and then flags the ones that come out higher than expected. Rosie’s Home Cookin’, for example, has an average rating of 4.7 whereas the average for American restaurants on the map is 3.83, meaning Rosie’s performs +0.87 better than similar restaurants in the area, marking it as underrated. “If you think about it and explore the website, you will see the kind of places locals love once they try them, but that don’t always show up when you do the usual ‘restaurant near me’ search,” Campolargo said. The goal of the map is simple: help people discover local restaurants and support the community by bringing more diners to businesses that may be overlooked otherwise. “The people behind the restaurants, man, they work really, really hard day in, day out, feed so many people, pay taxes, make our city what it is,” Campolargo said. You can check out the Naperville Underrated Food Map at www.juandavidcampolargo.com/projects/naperville-food-map. [email protected] ...read more read less